Considering the Burial ground – Tuam Babies

This calls for reblogging. It is a matter of national shame that powerful elements of the press are so embedded with vested interests that they have attempted to shut down this shocking story of how we treated our infants in the past, while PR shills claim that truth-tellers are “losing the run of themselves”.

I write from a place of emotional violence. The emotional violence is born from how we suppress ourselves and our past in the face of raw power.

Whenever I visit my parents in my homeplace near Tuam, I catch up with Mam’s ongoing work to research the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. I’ve seen the multiple and varied representations of the burial ground that have been published in the media over the past year, and here I try to outline what I know of the ground myself.

The site today alongside 1905/6 OS map revision

Above ground, there seems to be little evidence as to what lies beneath. If you visit the site – and you should, to get a sense of it alongside the maps and images here – you’ll find a walled-off corner of the open space at the back of houses in the residential estate, built here after the Home was demolished. It has two gates leading into it. Galway County Council put the wall and the little gates there, knowing what the space was, but nothing else.